


Stranger things

by Trash



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: Gen, LSD, LSD test
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 08:59:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1157718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chester owes Brad some money, and there are plenty ways to pay him back</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranger things

The centre isn’t in the city, that much Chester knows, but the drugs make everything foggy and his tongue loll swollen and useless in his mouth. The doctor beside him in the car says, “We’re just going to run some tests. Thank you for volunteering.”

He knows for sure that he didn’t volunteer for anything. But he can’t remember anybody kidnapping him. He thinks, maybe, Brad set this all up. Brad, his angel on his shoulder and his devil too. “The money you owe me…there are other ways to pay,” he said once, “Than with money. I have some people I need to get off my back.”

When he walks through the front doors he has a flash back of being admitted to hospital. A tumour, they had said, in your brain. But later they told him it was parasites, and he laughed until they sedated him.

They lead him down a hallway to a room with a single bed, two chairs and a window with chicken wire between the panes. There’s an en-suite bathroom with no window and a tiny closet.

“Am I here because I’m crazy?” Chester asks, scratching absently at the track marks running up and down the inside of his right arm.

“No,” The doctor smiles easily, hands deep in his pockets, “You’re here as a volunteer. You can leave at any point you like.”

But when they leave him alone in the room, they lock the door.

***

His first meal tastes like ash in his mouth. It’s been spiked, but nobody says anything. They watch him eat, slow, careful chewing.

“How are you feeling, Chester?” One doctor asks from the chair by the bed.

“I feel okay.” He says.

They stay, even after he’s finished eating, and bring in a CD player. The music is classical, Mozart or some other such bullshit that Chester hasn’t got time for. “Don’t you have any Stone Temple Pilots? Orgy, even?”

“What do you think of this music, Chester?”

He says nothing for a while. He’s been stunned into silence by the beautiful colours dancing from the speakers. Like glow sticks in a rave, streaks of luminous pink and blue and yellow and red and orange pump from the speakers of the player. The colours fill the room, swarming around the doctors’ heads as the music plays on.

“It’s…it’s colourful,” he says, lying back and watching the colours dance.

***

There are no clocks in the centre, and most patients are so withdrawn they don’t care and when Chester talks to them he mostly gets blank stares. There’s a boy called Mike who is probably about nineteen and shakes until about noon when he’s taken for tests. When he comes back he’s fine, and talks animatedly about what he’s going to do when he gets out.

But Chester heard the doctors speaking of the culling room, and he doesn’t think Mike will ever make it to art school.

***

The injection they give him makes his mouth dry. The doctors tell him to take a seat at the table which is in the centre of the therapy room. They set down a large crate full of paper, pencils, paints, charcoal and say, “Would you like to draw, Chester?”

He wants to punch them for talking to him like he’s a kid but just shrugs, scratches his track marks and pulls out a sheet of paper from the box. He takes a stick of charcoal too, says “What should I draw?”

One of the doctors sits side on and turns his head to smile at Chester, “Draw me.”

He draws the man, his bald head, his half moon glasses and bad Hawaiian shirt. They watch him and, when he’s done, they ask “How do you feel?”

“Kind of hungry.”

“Why don’t you draw him again?”

This is an hour and a half after he was injected and he shrugs, smiling widely, “Okay.”

The drawing doesn’t come out right. Chester can’t control his hand and scars the sketch with angry dark charcoal lines.

“How are you feeling?”

Chester looks up, frowning, “I can see him clearly, so clearly. The…it’s….my hand, it just wants to keep going even when I try to stop.”

After they make him draw again and he can only sketch the outline he asks, “Did you guys give me acid?”

“Would you like to draw again, Chester?”

“No I wouldn’t like to fucking draw again,” he says, but digs out a box of crayons anyway.

It’s been two hours since he was dosed when he starts laughing and can’t stop. But then the floor turns into a giant mirror and he stares at himself in it closely for a long time, startled. Around his reflection shadows twist and bend and he shudders visibly.

He gets out of his chair and empties the box with the art tools in it, climbs inside and sits there, chewing his nails.

“Chester?” A nurse asks carefully, “Would you like to draw some more?”

He looks up eventually, stares blankly, “I am...everything is...changed... they're calling...your face... interwoven... who is...”

He waves his arms in the air, slow movements as he hums softly to a tune nobody recognises. A song he wrote, once, in a different time. When he was a different person. When he wasn’t always looking for an escape.

“You could be anything you want to be,” his dad said when Chester slept through his graduation, “But you want to be a lazy fuck instead.”

“No,” Chester had said, “Wanna be a rock star.”

Sex, drugs, rock and roll are what led him here. Well, mostly it was just the drugs.

He climbs out of the box and sits at the table, draws quickly, a man’s face drawn in bright orange with angry red eyes, blood red lips and hair as black as night.

“What have you drawn?” They ask.

“Me.” He says, and laughs until they sedate him.


End file.
